Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived • Hacker News Board

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#321

Post by ncr100 » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #300

no_multitudes wrote: post #145

I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously. The firt citation for marriage data is listed as "Hajnal (RH31)", but links to a seemingly unrelated WorldCat search. The second citation is to "Kaplan (RH03)", which I was able to track down on sci-…

My person was “orphaned at 34” Great idea but it needs more testing.

An example of:

- Quality With A "K" !

Is AI able to easily catch these kinds of errors with a carefully crafted addendum to the prompt?

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#322

Post by softwaredoug » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

Drawing these random unrecorded lives makes me think a lot of Train Dreams a movie/book about a kind of unremarkable, random guy in the Northwest who sits witnessing history, dying with nobody remembering him.

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#323

Post by mathieu_aithos » Fri, Sep 04, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

Elon Musk said that (without him ;)) world demography gone a decline, as it is in Japan or Italy.

If radical right political parties arrive in Europe for exemple, are women gone a make children again? Or are we going to massively clone ourselves to conquer other planets?

Or finally let humanity slowing disappear letting robots replacing them definitively ?

What do you think?

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#324

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 2:11 AM UTC

doginasuit wrote: post #248

This is brilliant. I think it could stand to be a little more imaginative in their stories. It seems like it should be possible to do that while still conveying an accurate picture. "He made his living as a professional" is simply a wasted opportunity. There shouldn't be anything so vague. If you we're listening to a story, you would feel cheated. Embrace your idea.

A similar site, also LLM-assisted, that does a better and more evocative job of composing stories.

https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/

Re: Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

#325

Post by BLACKCRAB » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 3:35 AM UTC

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